What could be the basis of our having more inherent value than animals? Their lack of reason, or autonomy, or intellect? Only if we are willing to make the same judgment in the case of humans who are similarly deficient.
Interpretation
The quote questions the basis of human superiority over animals based on traits like reason and intellect.
Tom Regan's quote challenges the notion that humans have inherent value over animals due to characteristics like reason, autonomy, or intellect. By questioning this assumption, he prompts us to consider the moral implications of how we value all beings, including those humans who may also lack these attributes, thus advocating for a more egalitarian perspective on life and its inherent worth.
In practice
During a debate on animal rights, this quote can highlight the inconsistency in how we evaluate beings.
The other animals humans eat, use in science, hunt, trap, and exploit in a variety of ways, have a life of their own that is of importance to them apart from their utility to us. They are not only in the world, they are aware of it. What happens to them matters to them. Each has a life that fares better or worse for the one whose life it is.
It is not larger, cleaner cages that justice demands...but empty cages; not traditional animal agriculture but a complete end to all commerce in the flesh of dead animals; not more humane hunting and trapping, but the total eradication of these barbarous practices.
It is not an act of kindness to treat animals respectfully. It is an act of justice.
I would encourage them never to forget that they were not always vegans. The self-righteousness of the recently converted hurts, it does not help, other animals.
You can't retrieve you life (unless you're on Wikipedia, in which case you can retrieve an inaccurate version of it).
Plato used the dialogue format because the exchange of views, the posing and answering of questions, showed that understanding is a living, dynamic process. He distrusted writing because the settled character of the written word makes it look as if truth can be fixed and made to stand still. It is worth remembering that this greatest advocate of the objective reality of truth also believed that our access to that truth was sustained in reasoned discussion.
When we try to describe the truth with words, we distort it and it's no longer truth--it's our story. The story may be true for us, but that doesn't mean it's true for anyone else.
I cannot believe that the inscrutable universe turns on an axis of suffering; surely the strange beauty of the world must somewhere rest on pure joy!
The last clear definite function of man — muscles aching to work, minds aching to create beyond the single need — this is man.
Being a Christian has not and does not come naturally or easy for me. I take that to be a good thing because I am sure that to be a Christian requires training that lasts a lifetime.
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